


what i need

by panthalassa



Category: Ocean's (Movies), Ocean's 8, Ocean's Eight
Genre: Angst, F/F, I don't even know what happened here, but then it's kind of ok, i mean..., like they're hot AND sad?, this is mostly me trying to figure out what debbie's deal is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-01 12:15:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15142886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panthalassa/pseuds/panthalassa
Summary: On her second night of freedom, Deb appears in Lou’s doorway, fidgeting nervously in her oversized FDNY t-shirt.She hasn’t planned this part.“Deb?” She’s forgotten Lou’s early morning voice. Gravelly soft and hesitant.“It’s too quiet,” Deb’s voice matches her declaration. Suddenly Lou is awake.*NOW WITH ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS*





	1. dot dot dot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok Debbie Ocean, I tried getting inside your head. I had to know why you did it. I’m still not sure I do.
> 
> Pretty sure this deviates from their relationship as I actually see it happening in this timeline, but I’m not even going to pretend I’m in control of these characters anymore…
> 
> Title is shared with a fun song by Hayley Kiyoko and Kehlani that is maybe also very accurate about certain someones.

On her second night of freedom, Deb appears in Lou’s doorway, fidgeting nervously in her oversized FDNY t-shirt.

She hasn’t planned this part. The realisation stops her in her tracks.

Lou’s sleeping form is just visible in the dark, face smashed into the pillow, limbs akimbo. The familiarity of it makes her equilibrium yaw.

The bed emits a low groan and eyes glint to life from beneath a curtain of hair.

“Deb?” She’s forgotten Lou’s morning voice. Gravelly soft and hesitant, still deciding what to make of the day. Considering the day has only made 2 hours of itself so far, there isn’t much to conclude.

Deb pads softly across the room.

“What is it?” Lou asks, mouth full of pillow. “Did crime call? Because we’re off duty until at least…” a hand grasps at the side of the bed for her watch, drawing it to her face “Jesus.”

Scrubbing a hand through her blonde tangle, Lou fixes Deb with a more lucid stare and reaches for her wrist.

“Something wrong?”

Deb very nearly bottles.

“It’s stupid, don’t worry… go back to sleep,” but Lou’s hand is firm. Not letting go.

Deb stares down at it and breathes through her nose.

“It’s too quiet,” Deb’s voice matches her declaration, and suddenly Lou is awake, clambering to the far side of the bed, holding the covers to her chest as she grasps around for a t-shirt.

“Hey,” her voice is gentle, muffled by the cotton as she pulls it over her head, sheets pooling at her waist. She pats the bed beside her.

Deb’s feet carry her into the open folds of Lou’s still-warm sheets as the other woman wedges a pillow against the headboard and regards her curiously.

She cradles her knees to her chin, trying to keep all the silence inside her, so maybe her partner won’t notice the odd new creature that’s crawled into her bed.

But Lou never misses a beat. She scoops Deb’s bedhead over one shoulder and peers forward, searching her face.

“What’s going on?”

She thought she could do this. Go rip a button off his shirt and come home and laugh about it over take out and feel cleansed. Be Debbie Ocean again.

But she can’t.

Deb’s eyes fill up because she doesn’t know what to say, and it’s Lou, and she’s never not known what to say to Lou, and that frightens her even more.

Lou looks a bit taken aback by being suddenly handed control of the situation, but her hands find Deb’s waist, and she pulls her scrunched up ball of a partner between her knees, so Deb has to face her.

Deb can feel her waiting it out, and wishes she hadn’t taught her that.

She hadn’t slept at the hotel the night before, but she’d chalked it up to the pleasant buzz of being out in the world and on the game again. Finally starting into the list was a pleasure almost physically tangible; hardly soporific.

But now. Now she was as close to home as she could be in this world, and the hollow night had knocked around her head for hours. Even in solitary, there had been light and noise and distraction. Not here.

But she _prefers_ the quiet. Or used to.

Yet suddenly the world had become a vastness before her and when the day and its demands ebbed away, Deb found that night drew purpose from her hands like grains of sand, and she lay paralysed in the dark.

What eventually arrives is more choked snuffle than words.

“I thought things would be the same… that I’d be the same,” Lou’s understanding look finally causes her to crumple, and she shifts to wrap her legs around Lou’s sides as her partner cradles her to her chest.

Maybe if she can just climb inside Lou there’ll be a quiet place she can rest, between her ribs, next to the steady, unchanging rhythm of her heart.

“You’re an idiot,” Lou plants a gentle kiss at her hairline. Never one to sugar coat it.

Deb sniffs into her chest, deflecting. “How the fuck did you manage to go practically off grid in the city anyway? I can hear myself think out loud in this place. It’s horrifying.”

“Well, your thoughts generally are.”

A laugh jostles her head a little and she smiles. She’s making Lou laugh again. When people asked what she wanted to do most when she was back outside, it wasn’t to swim or lie in the grass or even shoplift - it was this. Not that she’d realised it would entail sitting in her partner’s lap at 2am, radically upping the salt content of her t-shirt.

She is surprised by their stillness; how their bodies at least seem to remember each other. They’re forever haphazardly invading each other’s personal space, but Deb has never shown up and all but said “I need you” before. Her eyes focus and unfocus with the weight of it, as she stares into the darkness beyond Lou’s shoulder.

She recalls hearing that you shouldn’t look directly into the void.

A hand travels soothingly up and down her back, grounding her. What Lou lacks in comforting eloquence, she has always made up for by being 5 foot 7 of warm, pliable bones that belong to Deb.

Belong _ed_.

Even as she is wrapped around a soft, breathing, bodily present Lou, the newness of this world tugs at Deb. Things aren’t exactly the same. Not anymore.

Hoping for some kind of reassurance, she straightens to meet Lou’s gaze, smoothing idly at the loose collar of her shirt, where creamy skin and disarrayed blonde hair meet soft cotton.

She catches a flicker cross her partner’s face, like smoke in the breeze.

Impulsively, Deb chases after it, leaning to press her mouth against Lou’s parted lips. It takes a moment for the other woman to respond in kind, arms tightening around Deb’s waist as she pulls her closer. Then there is only air, and Deb’s eyes flicker open in confusion.

“Deb. What are you doing?” Lou asks, voice quietly guarded.

For the first time in her whole life, Deb doesn’t have an answer to that question.

She searches her partner’s eyes for one, but they are still pools - clear and blue and patient.

“I haven’t just been waiting here on pause,” Lou says gently, the way you deliver a truth that you also need to hear yourself.

“I know,” Deb blurts out, automatically.

Deep down, she knows that. Yet if she was wholly honest with herself… Deb had expected Lou to be waiting. There at the drop of a text.

When left alone, Lou doesn’t change much. Same hair, same waistcoats, same jewellery. She’s been making her way through the world in Deb’s slipstream for as long as they can both remember. Without her partner in crime, she’s knocking off watered down vodka in the back of a grotty nightclub, for fuck sake. And not even doing it herself.

A selfish little corner of Deb’s heart has always told her that Lou _needs_ her to make life interesting.

Doesn’t she?

“I’m… sorry,” she tries.

The words sound shouted in the early morning stillness, and Lou blinks at her in slow surprise. Debbie Ocean doesn’t apologise. Not for anything. Because she doesn’t make mistakes.

“You left,” Lou’s voice is quiet.

Ok, so they’re doing this. Deb draws in a long breath.

“Well, the State of New York wasn’t exactly negotiating.”

“Before that.”

Lou’s hands haven’t left Deb’s sides, but they’ve stilled, no longer reassuring. Her body feels tense, its borders ending well before Deb’s begin, despite their entwined limbs. They’re always tangled, her and Lou. In some way or other.

Deb had prepared for this. In a sense. But knowing you’ve owed someone an explanation for six years and actually delivering it are very different things.

She’d run the scenarios in prison; the ones where Lou was angry, wounded, passionate, already with someone else. Not the one where she had Deb pinned in place, like a specimen on a table, calmly demanding answers from the one person who always had them.

Her hands flutter across Lou’s sternum. The grey shirt hangs loosely on her thin frame. How can you miss someone this much?

She gathers herself to look Lou in the eye, because she deserves that, not because Deb has in any way marshalled the tears welling in her own.

“I did.”

The truest truth. It takes the air out of the room.

“… and now I don’t know-” her voice cracks.

Life was a big adventure she was having on her own and Lou had changed that. It had frightened her. She told herself that Lou was small time and she needed a big haul of her own. She was an Ocean, after all, and she knew her family’s opinion of her pulling small jobs on banks and casinos up and down the coast with what they delicately termed her ‘particular friend’.

“I don’t know what to do, Lou.”

“Why… why did you go?” Lou’s clearly been running this scenario too, but done a lot more crying in her versions. Lou’s always been more prone to tears, more ready to laugh, life rippling more easily across the surface of her beautiful features. But now, she’s dry eyed.

The thought that Lou’s had half a decade to cry herself out on this one sends Deb’s stomach plummeting.

She wants desperately to press her back into the headboard and apologise with her whole body. To touch Lou everywhere she once touched her, everywhere anyone’s been since, so that they will fully remember each other. Remember why they were. Not why they stopped.

She squeezes at Lou’s sides with her knees, wanting to draw her closer in.

“I felt like I’d missed the moment where it was supposed to be something more.”

She draws in a shaky breath.

“We hadn’t been good for… for a while, and I woke up one day and realised we’d been running the same cons for a month. Waking up in the same bed, doing the same things. I’d never thought about it because it was _you_ and we were _us_ , but then I realised that we might be us forever. This new, unhappy us, in some tiny place running shitty jobs and… I got scared.”

She waits a long time for Lou to respond.

“So you quit?”

“I thought I wanted-“

“Something better?”

Deb sighs.

“Something that was just mine. Danny had just gotten out and hit Vegas with Rusty, and I knew what my family thought of…us.”

Lou’s eyes darken.

“You never told me.”

“I know. I was a fucking coward Lou, I’m so sorry.”

She cradles her partner’s face in her hands, until Lou reaches up to take them in her own. Her fingers are cold, and Deb runs her thumb over each one. They contemplate their tangled hands in the cold half-light.

At last, Lou sighs.

“You could have said, Deb.”

“Which one would you have punched first?”

Lou’s eyes glint - the first time Deb has seen light in them.

“Danny.”

“Obviously.”

The silence that settles around them is comfortable this time. Deb’s head is no longer loud with the clamour of a thousand thoughts; just one thing that she wants. Lou.

“Lou?”

“Mmmm?”

“I’m not leaving again.”

“You’ll have to eventually, or you’re gonna give me a dead leg,” Lou presses her heels into Deb’s back; a quick, reassuring squeeze.

“I remember your pillow talk being better than that.”

Lou sobers, sharply.

“Deb-,” she begins.

“I mean it,” Deb clutches her partner’s hands.

Lou looks at her sadly.

“I don’t know if I can…” she casts her eyes down. “It’s going to take a while.”

“That’s ok,” Deb urges, in a frantic tone she’s never heard come from her own lips before. “Just… please. Please don’t say no.”

Begging is not a move she’s road tested before, but then everything since she stepped out of jail has been new in ways Deb hasn’t expected. Including herself.

Lou looks a little afraid this time, as Deb searches her gaze for permission. She lets their lips brush for a long time, their breath mingling in the early morning air while she makes promises with her eyes before allowing her partner to close the last of the distance between them. Lou’s mouth opens beneath hers and Deb’s hands itch to find the soft skin beneath her shirt but she doesn’t push further, and Lou doesn’t object.

It turns out Lou isn’t all cried out after all, and Deb can taste the salt of her tears. The last time, she swears by all the diamonds she’s about to steal, that she’ll ever make Lou cry.

Lou presses her back into the sheets with one final kiss, then gets up and pads across to quietly close the door.

Sliding the shirt over her head, Lou slips back between the sheets in her underwear and holds her arms out.

“Just come be close to me.”

Deb wriggles out of her expansive shirt and curls gratefully into Lou’s side, hand grazing down the smooth skin of her back.

Lou’s hand comes to rest at her hip and the sudden rushing memory of it makes Deb’s chest ache.

Her mouth settles at its favourite place in the whole world, at the base of Lou’s throat.

Their world falls still for a few moments before a voice rumbles through her chest.

"If you're fantasising about me wearing the Toussaint right now, fuck off."

Deb’s watery laugh pushes back at the darkness.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IDK guys, I tried getting them to have a serious conversation and didn’t expect Deb to show up and literally *climb* Lou. But it is Lou and I guess five years is a long time…
> 
> That or these characters are so traumatised by how they’re handled in the movie that they need to cling to each other I mean your choice…


	2. dash dash dash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lou is re-mapping this Ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, I need to say thank you SO much for all of your lovely comments and generally gorgeous welcoming response since I started writing for this fandom. It's really the first time I've consistently produced fic for anything, and it's only partly because the characters won't shut up in my head... it's also looking forward to all your lovely (digital) faces each time I write something new! So thank you, truly!
> 
> I didn't know there was more of this until y'all asked, but I felt like Lou's side of the story needed to come in...

Lou pauses with her hand halfway back into the bag of coffee, scoop dangling purposelessly from her fingers. Dropping it the rest of the way in, she sighs and rolls the foil down, stashing it in the cupboard.

If she closes the door a little louder than usual, it’s only in frustration at herself. It’s the third morning since Deb reappeared in her life. In her bed. A shimmering mirage suddenly come into focus.

Solid and real, and tea drinking.

Lou hits the switch and her coffee machine grumbles to life.

She puts some water on for Deb’s tea, trying again to delete her partner’s coffee preference from her brain. Yet more information that she no longer needs to know, needn’t have held on to. Some poor tiny neurons in the corner of her brain pointlessly lighting up on ‘black one sugar’ for nearly six years, in hope of future use.

Cataloguing all the new things about Deb should be interesting. Or precious. Or something. Not this jarring, queasy feeling. Not like she’s one of those people who suddenly can’t recognise the faces of those they love; forever trapped with a stranger who sounds and feels familiar.

Her rings clatter loudly against the mug handles, everything amplified in the morning stillness. Deb is banging about somewhere upstairs. She never did help out with breakfast. Chalk one up to the list of things that haven’t changed.

Lou goes for a smile but feels her mouth draw into a tight grimace, vision blurring in the rising steam.

They’re supposed to be focussed. Tight. A perfectly oiled machine in the build up to something so audacious that Lou would never have agreed to it had she not been staring at the lips that proposed it right as they delivered the news.

Deb had always been her blind spot, but they’re in danger of levelling up to full on Achilles heel, bring the whole operation crumbling to the ground territory if she can’t get a grip on this.

Why had they made no time to re-learn each other before taking on a team and a massive job? Why did they have to rush into every fucking thing?

“Hey!” Deb clatters down the stairs and sweeps into the kitchen. “Smells great!”

A hand grazes the small of Lou’s back as Deb reaches for her mug. In the past, that different continent, Deb would have pinched her ass or just pinned her against the countertop, all thoughts of breakfast forgotten.

“It’s just coffee,” Lou bites, a little more provocatively than she intends.

Deb merely smiles warmly at her. “Hazelnut!”

“I thought you didn’t do coffee now.” Lou is tired of navigating these winding roads. Each hairpin bend makes her feel like she’s left her stomach in 2008.

Deb sobers a little as she pours her water, and Lou hears the reason for her over-exuberance - Tammy is softly crossing the floor to the kitchen.

“I don’t,” she finds Lou’s eyes with hers. “This just smells like home.”

——

“ _This_ is what you borrowed?” Deb pulls the half-remembered silk robe from Lou’s bedpost and holds it up to the light.

“Yeah, well, your slinky black numbers have never exactly been my thing,” Lou catches her eye in the mirror as she removes what Deb affectionately refers to as her ‘jewellery store’ piece by piece.

“That’s not how I remember it,” Deb arches an eyebrow in her direction.

Sometimes their usual push and pull feels easy and light. Others, they both draw back as though from a flame - bright and tempting and uncontrollable.

Lou eases her bracelet onto the night stand so it doesn’t make a sound. She always feels light and unreal without her clinking armour, like she might float away. Few people see her like this.

“I thought you’d at least have a night out in my Louboutins!” Deb is the first to break eye contact, defusing the situation by busying herself with slipping into the robe, smoothing its sleeves along her arm, imprinting its memory and its newness there.

“But this was so good at fending off those harsh New York winters,” Lou laughs, enjoying the sound as it bubbles naturally through her. Enjoying the sight of Deb in her purloined hotel robe. Something familiar. Something that has stayed the same.

When Lou said she’d borrowed some of Deb’s shit, what she really meant was that she’d carefully stored it all in the spare bedroom, and taken one thing to remember her partner by before closing the closet door. For a long time.

“Poor baby, blown in from the nice warm tropics, “ Deb slips her arms around Lou’s waist, and rocks her side to side. Half mocking, half affectionate.

Lou’s hands slide beneath the robe, finding the smooth curve of Deb’s hips, where her tank doesn’t quite meet her soft cotton pants.

“Poor storm, minding its business until I fell in,” even she can hear that her voice has dropped an octave as Deb’s eyes scan her face, seeking permission, their foreheads almost touching.

Deb is always cautious these days, always double checking, as though Lou might shatter if she holds on too tight. When Lou said she’d need time, she hadn’t realised Deb would treat her like a Ming vase. Though of all people, Deb was far more likely to be practical than jumpy when it came priceless objects.

Every time their lips meet, it feels different. No matter how Lou tries to map it.

They’ve been sharing a bed, sharing breakfast, sharing body heat for almost four days, but for all their looks and glances and cultivated intimacy, they haven’t made it past second base.

She and Deb had first ended up together through a total abandonment of caution and Lou has no idea how they’ll get back to that place while they’re both half frightened of each other, and more frightened of making Tammy feel like she’s parachuted into a melodramatic season finale of The L Word.

Deb draws back, teeth grazing Lou’s lower lip as she presses one more kiss against her mouth before meeting her eyes, sensing that something is off.

“What are you thinking?”

That this Deb has a new scar on her hip. That her hair smells different, and every now and again she likes to go out and sit on the beach, among the needles and broken glass, just to remind herself that she _can_ get up and walk outside into wide open spaces… and that fact makes Lou want to hold her forever and burn the world.

That this Lou has some more worry lines. A new wolf ring that weighs down her right hand in a way that makes her feel ready for a fight, but not to tell Deb what it means. And a tight band across her ribs that squeezes “be careful” whenever Deb gets too close. That this Lou is full of secrets.

“I’m not sure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's one more bookend to this... will it be from Deb or Lou? Do you know? Do I?!


End file.
